So Say We All?

For once, Drudge and I agree.

I know. He doesn't mean it the way I mean it. Sigh. But for a moment, 'twas as though he was reading my mind.

Oh, and see that guy behind Joe-mentum? He's going, "I can't stand him either."

Joe-Mentum is Mocked by Two Bespectacled Atheist Bloggers

Joe Lieberman is on everyone's last nerve.

He endorsed John McCain, he's threatening to filibuster health care, and if you believe my paranoid tweets, he's also filibustering the birth of my first child.

Well, at least two of us have had enough, and we needed to express our outrage in the only way we knew how.

Bad impersonations.

I mean, what better way to really take Joe-mentum down a notch than by having two nerdy-yet-adorable atheist bloggers with thick-rimmed glasses do lame-ass impressions of His Whiny-ness? Let me answer that for you. There is no better way.

So me and Miranda Celeste Hale (author of Exquisite with Love, easily the loveliest place on all the internets) decided to have a crack at Joe, in the hopes of beginning a new trend. A Liebermeme, if you will.

And you will.

First, here's mine.



And here's Miranda's. She kind of one-upped me with a full-out monologue, when all I really wanted to do was make a funny face.



Many props to Miranda.

Now how's-about you turn on your little webcam, and show off your own in-Joe-cation? Show us your Liebermeme!

Binding Anti-Blasphemy Advances with Veiled Threats of Terrorism

Islamist demonstration outside Danish Embassy in London in 2006

(Photo: Jacob Lundberg)

An internationally enforceable anti-blasphemy law is on the march, and according to the chair of one UN subcommittee, resistance to such a backward and oppressive treaty will result in increased terrorism.

Frank Jordans of the Associated Press reports today that Algeria and Pakistan are actively pursuing a binding international treaty in the UN General Assembly that would forbid insult to or mockery of religion and its accompanying practices, symbols, artifacts, and figures. It is the latest--and arguably, boldest--attempt yet by the Organization of Islamic States to impose anti-blasphemy laws on the rest of the world, and codify religiously-based oppression and censorship. Per Jordans:

The Islamic Conference "believes that the attack on sacredly held beliefs and the defamation of religions, religious symbols, personalities and dogmas impinge on the enjoyment of human rights of followers of those religions," the letter said. It was sent last month to members of the Ad Hoc Committee on Complementary Standards, a temporary committee created to consider a previous anti-racism treaty.

This is, of course, utterly nonsensical on its face. The right to "enjoy," experience, or partake in the religious tradition of one's choosing is absolutely, in no way infringed upon, harmed, or obstructed one iota by even the most merciless of mockery of or tasteless insult to that faith. The most vile rhetorical attack on a religion is insufficient to keep anyone from exercising their right to practice or believe in that religion in the slightest bit. The entire enterprise is based upon a sinister lie.

But it is a lie that is gaining steam. In March of this year, the UN Human Rights Council passed a resolution to combat the "defamation of religions" through murky language implying that governments are within their rights to take measures to restrict speech that might be offensive to believers. Since then, reverberations of this stance have manifested in troubling ways: Turkey opposed the appointment of  Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen to the post of Secretary-General of NATO because of his unwillingness to apologize for the infamous cartoons of Mohammad that sparked riots and violence throughout the Muslim world. In August, Christians in a Pakistan village were horrifically slaughtered because of mere rumors that someone in the village had defaced a Koran, something considered a legitimate and official crime in Pakistan.

I have bemoaned the US administration's silence on the issue of anti-blasphemy initiatives, but last month Secretary of State Hillary Clinton came out strongly in opposition, saying, per the Washington Post:

"Some claim that the best way to protect the freedom of religion is to implement so-called anti-defamation policies. . . . I strongly disagree," Clinton said. "The protection of speech about religion is particularly important since persons of different faiths will inevitably hold divergent views on religious questions."

One part of Jordans' piece, however, was particularly horrifying:

In a telephone interview Wednesday, the Ad Hoc Committee [on Complementary Standards]'s chairman, Algerian Ambassador Idriss Jazairy, said concerns the treaty could stifle free speech have been "whipped up into a bugaboo."

Failure to agree on a treaty would boost extremists in the Arab world, said Jazairy, a former envoy to Washington now considered a key player in the U.N.'s human rights forum.

"If we keep hitting this glass wall and say there's nothing you can do about Islamophobia — you can do something about anti-Semitism but Islamophobia is out of bounds — you give an ideal platform for recruitment of suicide bombers," he said.

In other words, if we don't have anti-blasphemy laws that specifically protect Islam, then we can expect an increase in terrorist attacks killing masses of innocent people. This is quite disturbing, especially coming from someone who is considered a "key player" in international human rights, and it is extremely difficult not to read Jazairy's words as a threat.

Clearly, this is a movement that will not be stifled by polite finger-wagging by the West. It is something to be understood, to be exposed, and to be resisted.

Related Secularism Examiner Articles:

• UN Human Rights Council passes resolution to 'combat defamation of religions'
• Anti-blasphemy gone wild: Turkey disrupts NATO chief's appointment over Danish cartoon
• US media mostly silent on UN anti-blasphemy resolution
• The stakes of UN anti-blasphemy resolutions become clear; US media still quiet
• Diplomats dump 'defamation of religion' language from UN racism conference: Good enough?
• Latest takes on UN 'anti-blasphemy' resolutions
• Obama should condemn the UN anti-blasphemy resolution

Follow Friday #4

I felt overwhelmed with good choices for this week's #FollowFriday post, but then suddenly yesterday, a meme erupted.

Following the release of a horribly depressing poll showing that a majority of Republicans believe that ACORN stole the 2008 election for Barack Obama, progressive tweeps hijacked the hashtag for #acornfacts with an avalanche of snarky faux-facts about ACORN, blaming them for everything from the Wall Street collapse to the election of Gaius Baltar to President of the Twelve Colonies, to the crash of Oceanic Flight 815.

I thought I had come up with a few gems, if I do say so myself, including:

• ACORN killed Jesus. #acornfacts
• ACORN let the dogs out. #acornfacts
• Why did the chicken cross the road? It didn't. ACORN forged its name into this joke. #acornfacts
• I saw Goody ACORN with the devil! #acornfacts

But one entry from one of my tweeps, for me, rose above the rest:

• I'mma let you finish Acorn, but No God was the best Trending Topic of all time...OF ALL TIME! #acornfacts

And there were many LOLs.

That tweet came from Jacqueline Lavache, @eilonnwy, a fellow Examiner, and a most excellent tweep.

She also warned us that ACORN believes in opposite marriage, and that it has Google Wave invites that it will not be sharing with you. The horror.

Jaqueline was also a very good sport about being included in a list of my tweeps that I labeled as "fellow arrogant elitists." For this, for her Boston Atheism Examiner column, and for being in general a supremely positive addition to the heretical Tweetosphere, she gets my #FF recommendation this week.

[See here for an explanation of the Follow Friday series, and don't forget to follow me on Twitter!]

Rappers Against Phony Entertainers

Yeah, I still like this as much as I did back in the day.



Now that I'm older and crotchety-er, I really appreciate that it's a song that is asking the wider music industry not to dumb itself down. Unfortunately, the call was not heeded.

I did at one point test the waters with my wife to see if we could name our still-gestating son Prime Minister Pete Fidalgo. I think she's warming to it. It's '91, son, so somethin's gotta change.

BIRTHCON 3?

In case you haven't noticed, I haven't been absent yet. The signs we thought we were getting last week that our baby was going to be born any second seem to have turned out to be erroneous. This evening, however, Jessica--who normally goes to bed no later than 10pm--decided at 9:45pm that she absolutely had to vacuum the bathroom floor.

The lore, of course, is that when preggies get those overwhelming "nesting" urges (to clean up the house and whatnot), birth may be imminent. Well, so far, nothing's brewing, but I am, as always, ready.

So for now we remain at BIRTHCON 3. When she hits pre-labor, we'll raise the alert to BIRTHCON 4, and I'll probably let the tweetosphere know it's happening.

If you'd like to be among the few, the select, the bored who are following the Fetus Fidalgo developments, follow me and the hashtag #fetusfidalgo.

Hillary Clinton, Education, and Afghanistan

I have been very much encouraged by what appears to be a refreshing degree of forthrightness and assertiveness in the public comments of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. I have had love/suspect/hate/love feelings toward Sec. Clinton for some time--I worked in media research for her presidential campaign until a medical episode necessitated my exit, and even in my support of her and her candidacy I have often found myself disappointed or enraged by particular tactics here and there.

But as the chief of the United States' foreign policy operation, she has been blunt and unafraid of calling things as she sees them; a particularly impressive tightrope walk when one remembers that she is our top diplomat. I'm thinking particularly of her remarks in Pakistan in which she was clearly unafraid to imply that al Qaeda's whereabouts were not a mystery to everybody in the Pakistani government. And on the whole, she's loosened up, she speaks her mind, and she seems to have stopped trying to convince people to like her. That's our girl!

I did recently find a point she has made with which I do feel the need to quibble. On an otherwise excellent interview with Charlie Rose last week, Clinton said something that I hope was merely the result of a mushy attempt at making a larger point. Here's the transcript of the comment in question [emphasis mine]:

We fight wars to protect America, our values, our interests, our allies. We fight wars so that we can achieve an end point that we think is in furtherance of that.

So if we’re going to fight this war, then everybody better be very clear what it is that we’re trying to do. Would we like to see education levels in Afghanistan improve? Absolutely. Is that directly in our national security interests? Probably not.

So we want to help, but we want to keep focused on what is clearly in our national security interests, to dismantle, disrupt, and defeat al Qaeda and its extremist allies.

Really? A better-educated Afghanistan is not in our national security interests? This seems to me to be demonstrably false, and you can take any number of logical paths to see why. One seems pretty obvious: a more literate and educated nation is more likely to be economically prosperous, independent of need from other nations, and be less prone to conflict, both internally and externally.

Another is more directly related to ideology and religion: young men are indoctrinated in fundamentalist Islamist schools, learn to take extreme interpretations of Islam literally, and with little worldly education accompanying the indoctrination, become ripe for anti-Western, anti-modern sentiment.

So I am baffled by Clinton's comment. How could a more enlightened Afghanistan population not be in our direct national security interests? We certainly have no fear of violent extremism from South Korea or Sweden, so it only makes sense that not only would it be nice if Afghanis had better educations, but that it is crucial that they do. Clinton also talked about the "perversion" of Islam that abets the Taliban's hold over territory and codifies their oppression. Would not that "perversion" be far less influential, and would not the population be far less amenable to it, if everyone in Afghanistan were better-versed in history, science, civics, world literature, and yes, other religions? It seems to me that the best way to dilute the Taliban's influence over the "hearts and minds" of the Afghanistan population would be to give them a world-class education.

I want to assume that Sec. Clinton knows this, and that her comments were simply a clumsy attempt at a rhetorical contrast in the context of one lone interview. I hope that the entire U.S. government knows that wisdom and knowledge are the best vaccines against extremism and ignorance. (Sec. Clinton also cited ignorance as one of the modern "Berlin Walls" that challenge us today.) I'm not smart enough myself to know whether this means that we ought to be directly involved in bolstering the average I.Q. of Afghanistan villages, but I do hope we see that if we do have national security (and moral) priorities in Afghanistan, that the facilitation of education must rank very highly.


Related Secularism Examiner Articles:

• It's no longer okay to mix up the Constitution and the Declaration
• Ted Kennedy on the vital necessity of the separation of church and state, 1983
• Charlie Crist convinces God not to lay waste to Florida
• Opposing Francis Collins for NIH is not evidence of bigotry

Follow Friday #3

I had trouble this week, since I forgot to pick someone, and then I realized I had three minutes.

And then that profile pic hit me with the "I'm going to do something that would disqualify me from public office" look, and it all became clear:

This week, I recommend a follow to Sara Ann, @xTexasBelle, whose profile describes her as a "90's child, Hispanic, Female, Epic Flirt, Tweet Spamming, Atheist, Liberal. Batsluts rule, noobs suffer the force." You are warned.

And why do I choose her? Ballsiness. Apart from simply having a good stream of interesting and amusing tweets, she also regularly tweets in such a way that as I am scrolling up Tweetdeck, surveying recent messages, one of hers often makes me stop suddenly and think, "Yowza."

[See here for an explanation of the Follow Friday series.]

And hey, it's still Friday in the Central Time Zone!

Documents Misfiled

The following is not an isolated incident.

Keep reading after the video.



Now, I know that there might be some sympathy for a mix-up like this. Oh, you know, they're both really old founding documents on parchment with lots of fancy language about freedom and whatnot. I mean, they were both even hand-written with swirly cursive and show up on faded, beige, scroll-y paper. Give a guy a break, right?

NO.

Listen.

It is no longer okay to mix up the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. True, we moderns now tend to conflate these two documents in our collective memory as though they had sprung from the same heated deliberations. But they most certainly did not. The Declaration of Independence (as evidenced by its effing title) was our Dear John letter to Great Britain. It was the result of gut-wrenching debate and struggle, both among legislators and citizens (as well as within themselves), a monumental gamble to turn the continent's back on the motherland, risk death on scales unimaginable, and gamble that a relatively young hodgepodge of commonwealths and provinces could manage to govern itself as a brand new nation. And it was signed by 56 men in 1776.

The Constitution is a whole other ball of wax. It is the framework for the makeup of a national government. It establishes the branches of government, the powers and responsibilities of those branches, and how leaders and representatives will be elected or appointed to fill various positions within them. It was finally ratified in 1788 (get that? Twelve years after the Declaration!), and even that only happened after another proto-constitution, the Articles of Confederation, ratified in 1781, were deemed scrap-worthy in 1787. And what we usually tend to think of when we think of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, didn't even get ratified until 17-frickin'-91! That's 15 years after the Declaration!

So let's be clear. The Declaration of Independence was a letter to King George III saying "buh-bye-and-here's-why." The Constitution was an instruction manual for How to Built the United States Government. They are no more the same document than divorce papers are the same documents as the architectural plans for the singles' apartment complex one soon moves into. Oh, and the architectural plans were drafted twelve years after the divorce papers were filed. I think you get the point.

Here's another way to look at it. The Declaration was an expression of particular ideals and an intention to realize them. The Constitution was and is our attempt to do so.This literal con-fusion of these two documents is criminal--the passing of the centuries is not sufficient excuse for the blurring of these decidedly different documents and decidedly separate moments in history. "The Founding" was not achieved in one fell swoop, and it was not a single event.

It should not be surprising, I suppose, that those on the political right, who have never been predisposed to care about facts or reality to begin with, should opt not to concern themselves over this bit of data either. But every day in our political arena, it is the ideals and notions spelled out in these very two documents that we are fighting over--what they mean, what their implications are, and to whom they apply.

This kind of casual mixing-up of these documents, and the incorrect citations of quotes and passages from them, is a form of hypocrisy. You should not swear to protect and defend something, the contents of which you are wholly unfamiliar. It is akin to those who quote a snippet of scripture and wave their holy books aloft in order to prove a point or assert a moral truth, but have never actually read the book itself or really understand what's in it. Only this is worse, because our founding documents establish something that actually exists.

• Campbell Brown's non-scoop: Mixing up bias and bull in Fox News debate (with video)
• The Mojave Cross: Supreme Court dances around church-state issues, Scalia gets snippy
• The LA Times supports the wall of separation, but misses the bigger point

Hat tip to Brother Richard for the video.

My Awesome Blue Dog Origins Theory

How someone becomes a Blue Dog Democrat:

1. Live in a conservative district
2. Hold steadfastly conservative ideals about God, guns, and gays
   
3. Decide to run for Congress
4. Attend local Republican Party meetings
5. Realize that said party will nominate candidate who misses slavery, thinks homosexuals should be shot, and sincerely believes that Jesus is King of America
6. Join local Democratic Party

Good, right? Political science Ph.D, here I come!

Fair Warning of Imminent Sudden Absence

Just a quick heads up to let folks know that the birth of my son could happen any day now, so if you notice that I have suddenly stopped blogging, no, it's not because I've found Jesus (in my trunk), but because I am gleefully (and I imagine sleepily) looking after my offspring.

It is also possible that the kid is going to wait until mid-December to come out or something crazy like that, but IIIIII don't think so.

Until then, of course, I plan to keep prognosticating semi-regularly. I'm just saying: if things go dark for a while, that's why.

Same goes for my Examiner column, of course, where you can listen to my recent address to the Northern Virginia Ethical Society. That should hold you over.

Follow Friday #2

This week, I'm recommending a follow to @GodlessGirl.

GG is very active on Twitter, and always has pithy responses to whatever is percolating about the 'tubes, and she has a great eye for must-see Internet snark. What brings her to the top this week is her very moving blog post on her coming-out as an atheist to her mother.

A taste (spoiler alert!):

I had just told her I was an atheist. She’d listened to my story, and now she sat silenced, glossy-eyed, and buried beneath her thoughts. As I inhaled my food, I tried to imagine what she felt. Disappointment came to mind first. Probably a caring sort of pity, too. Perhaps she was praying. No, I knew she was praying. My mother always prayed. This is probably the first time she thought twice about praying aloud in front of me.

“I can see how it would be hard for you to deal with all of that alone,” she said.

Coiner of the term "geekysexy," full of what might be called moxy, she insists on her profile, "Curiosity killed the faith, not the sass." Good news for us all.

[See here for an explanation of the Follow Friday series.]

No, You Really Did

This completely jibes with tea baggers' unwillingness to accept other facts such as Obama's citizenship, his un-Muslim-ness, evolution, and Sarah Palin's lack of qualifications for public office.

Hitchens Make Gretchen ANGRY!

Christopher Hitchens and Douglas Wilson appear for the blink of an eye on the stomach-turning Fox & Friends:



Not that this surprises me, but one can't help buy notice how infoBarbie Gretchen Carlson is immediately upset with Hitchens, beginning by trying to cast an awkwardly delivered aspersion by saying that Hitchens has made a "career of being an atheist," with what I think is the clear implication that doing so is a pretty disgraceful thing. She is then visibly angry when she announces and awkwardly defends the notion that the atheists are "winning" in American public schools, and then asks Wilson how he could possibly "keep his cool" around Hitchens. A fair and balanced quasi-interview!

Hat tip to onegoodmove.